Los Angeles: A novel way to get through the front doors of the rich and famous in Hollywood

Here's a travel tip: if you're looking for a fun outing in Los Angeles, make out you're on the lookout for your very own movie-town mansion. Browsing the property section of the LA Times on a Sunday morning, I discovered that most of the glitzy estate agencies run 'open houses' for selected properties every Sunday afternoon from 2pm to 5pm.

It's a great way to find out, free, what these mini palaces (and some very maxi palaces) along the byways of Beverly Hills look like on the other side of their fortress-like walls. Most of the 'open houses', it has to be said, cover the less expensive end of the market (&pound;2 million and below) but it's still jolly good fun to be able to have a nose round.

Another day in tinsel town: Dawn breaks over Santa Monica's famous 100-year-old pier and its fairground

I set the satnav for Ferrari Drive (yes, really) to look at a &pound;1.7 million property which clung to the summit of a surprisingly steep Hollywood hill. On the switchback drive up to the house we passed the legendary Pickfair mansion at 1143 Summit Drive (currently on the market at &pound;27 million). This was once the home of Hollywood's first golden couple - silent screen idols Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks - and came to epitomise the lavish showbusiness world of the new movie royalty.

The house for sale on Ferrari Drive was far less lavish but impressive nevertheless, if only for the extent of its considerably bad-taste interior design - a sort of homage to a shiny Nineties wine bar. For your money you get five bedrooms, a lift, a 'chef's kitchen', maid's quarters and stunning views towards the city and the ocean.

The estate agent said that the Beverly Hills property market was surprisingly buoyant. 'Places that cost &pound;20 million sell like "that",' she said, clicking her fingers, the sound echoing around the vast vaulted sitting room.

Wheel good fun: Frank Barrett on his Segway

I opened the door to the terrace,
setting off the alarm system: 'Warning: garden door has been opened,'
shouted a computerised voice. Imagine the terror of hearing this going
off in the middle of the night.

'What are the neighbours like?' I
asked the estate agent. 'I wouldn't like to be disturbed by noisy
drug-fuelled showbiz parties every night.'

'You'll
be OK up here,' she said. 'It's mostly executive types these days.
Paris Hilton and her set live on the Doheny Estates off Sunset.'

Actually, you get the impression that few serious mainstream film stars make their home in old Hollywood. For example, Larry David, co-creator of legendary TV comedy show Seinfeld, films his HBO series Curb Your Enthusiasm in and around Pacific Palisades and Santa Monica, where he lives amid other Hollywood royalty.

Santa Monica, next to the ocean, is a few miles west of Hollywood down Santa Monica Boulevard (who is Santa, or Saint, Monica, I hear you ask? Well, bizarrely, she is the patron saint of 'difficult marriages and disappointing children').

Like the famous rollercoaster on its 100-year-old pier, the resort of Santa Monica has enjoyed an extraordinary number of ups and downs in its relatively short history. In the late Twenties, it attracted the Hollywood elite: Greta Garbo lived in the Miramar Hotel when she first came to Tinseltown.

This sumptuous hotel retains its celebrity allure and is a favourite of the likes of Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren, but by the Thirties Santa Monica had improbably become a haven for organised crime and the inspiration for thriller writer Raymond Chandler.

These days the place is undergoing an extraordinary boom, attracting the kind of liberal monied elite who drive Toyota Prius hybrid cars and enjoy buying organic food from Whole Foods (three branches all within carbon-friendly walking distance of downtown).

Live the dream...join a real estate agent's open house tour and get a glimpse at some of Beverly Hills' most beautiful houses

Surprisingly for a country where most people would be happy to drive a tank to work, Santa Monica takes a very green approach to life. People think that you can't enjoy a holiday in America without a car. Well, you can in Santa Monica, thanks to a very sophisticated bus service.

You can catch The Big Blue Bus - flat fare 75 cents - all the way down Santa Monica Boulevard through Hollywood to downtown LA. (It was a Big Blue Bus that Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock were aboard in the movie Speed.)

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Santa Monica's other great claim to fame is the Segway. You might have expected there to be a plaque referring to it on the seafront cycleway that leads from Santa Monica down to Venice; a small brass inscription, perhaps, recording the fact that right here a little piece of internet history was made on Friday, August 17, 2007.

Mr muscle: Arnold Schwarzenegger working out at Venice beach in 1977

On this spot a famous former British
newspaper editor was, in his own words, parading his 'toned, muscular,
tanned, superfit torso' on a Segway: 'a two-wheeled motorised stand-up
bike popular with the hip crowd'.

The torso in question belonged to Piers
Morgan. Pride at his buffed torso, however, came before a nasty fall.
'I suddenly lost control at 12mph, hit a kerb, flipped in the air and
hit the concrete horizontally rather hard.'

The event might have passed without
much notice had it not been filmed. Piers's friend had a video camera
and happened to catch the fall, which left Piers with 'a psychedelic
array of deep cuts, grazes and bruises', three broken ribs and a
collapsed lung.

The friend posted the video on the internet, where it became an instant classic and made Piers the second most famous Segway casualty after President George W. Bush, who also managed to topple off one.

Undaunted, I jumped on mine and found it to be extraordinarily good fun. In the company of Segway guide Gianni, who can be fleetingly glimpsed on the Piers video, we trundled down to Venice beach where Arnold Schwarzenegger rose to fame, pumping iron in the beachside gym.

Venice is LA's answer to San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, a louche hippy community selling 'medical marijuana' and organic snacks. It has some startlingly good buskers - one Jimi Hendrix performer looked and sounded so much like the original it was eerie.

Floating through all this on a Segway provided a weird, out-of-body
experience.

After an incident-free Segway ride, I headed a few miles up
the Pacific Coast Highway from Santa Monica to Malibu, which is still a
favourite hangout for A-list celebs. It was on the PCH that Mel Gibson
infamously unleashed an anti-Semitic tirade against a cop who had pulled him
over for speeding.

Head for the hills: Santa Monica Boulevard, from where the Big Blue Bus runs to Hollywood and LA

Here you are so near to LA but so far from its
madness: an al fresco breakfast at the Paradise Cove Beach Cafe with your feet
in the sand and your face in the sun is a real tropical treat.

What
particularly drew me here, however, was the Malibu Creek State Park, which 20th
Century Fox once used for movie sets.

In 1941, director John Ford had
originally planned to film his Oscar-laden movie How Green Was My Valley in
Wales - but after the outbreak of war he had to rethink. Instead, he built a
replica of the Rhondda mining valley in the hills above Malibu.

The Welsh
accents of the film sounded Irish and the circumlocutions were annoying ('Good
day to you, is it?'), but you have to admire the brave attempt at recreating a
powerful tale of Welsh social empowerment in the arid hills of
California.

Hailing from the Welsh mining valleys Hailing from the Welsh
mining valleys myself, it was a curious sort of homecoming.

How green was
my valley? How green was my valley? Well, greener and wetter than Malibu but
certainly never quite so much fun.